Modern telecommunications systems employ a variety of technologies to connect nodes across networks. Ethernet (standardized as IEEE 802.3) is a popular data link (OSI Layer 2) technology that is used to create local area networks (LANs). Each node on a LAN is assigned a unique identifier, and Ethernet uses Layer 2 media access control (MAC) addresses for this purpose. In the case of an Ethernet network consisting of a single LAN, all traffic from a given node is broadcast, in the form of data transmission units called frames or packets, to all other nodes. Broadcasting is a simple, yet inefficient, protocol for supporting network communications.